This Collins Classroom Classics edition includes an introduction and glossary to support students, written by an experienced teacher.
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Hard Times Charles Dickens
It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it…
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Introduction Hard Times: a novel of its time? On Friday 20 January 1854, Charles Dickens sat down, rather wearily, to plan out the novel he had never really expected to write.1 His notes reveal a writer grappling with the daunting creative task ahead of him. Before he had even written a single word of Hard Times, he sketched out some character names and nearly forty different titles for the work. These titles – with all their variations and crossings out – mark the birth of what was to become Dickens’s one and only ‘industrial novel’, a novel that shifted his centre of gravity away from the capital city and the London streets he knew so well to an entirely different world of workers, factories, wealthy northern industrialists and trade union meetings.2 In these notes, he circled repeatedly around key words and images. He toyed with titles that included the words ‘facts’, ‘figures’, ‘arithmetic’ and ‘calculations’: ‘Damaging Facts’; ‘Facts are Stubborn Things’; ‘Simple Arithmetic’; ‘A Matter of Calculation’. This numerical imagery was then linked with the name of his main character, noted at the top of his title list: ‘Mr Gradgrind’. His early suggestion for the novel’s title – ‘Mr Gradgrind’s facts’ – echoed the idiom ‘nose to the grindstone’, with its evocation of hard, steady, unrelenting labour. What followed were pairings of words in other potential titles that hinted at a novel built around fundamental conflicts: ‘Black and White’; ‘Hard Heads and Soft Hearts’. The word ‘time’ also began to appear and featured in five further suggestions on the list. Was this, then, to be a novel of the ‘times’, a story that would draw together and define the social challenges of the moment? Even more than that,
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Dickens appears to have been thinking that this would be a novel about hard times. He wrote the phrase once and crossed it out. Then he wrote it twice more.3 Dickens’s notes provide a tantalising taste of the multiple concerns that underpin what was to become Hard Times, his most openly didactic novel, in which he poses question after question and thereby endeavours to morally instruct his readers. What if a ‘hard’-hearted philosophy, which values figures over feelings, is allowed to dominate and triumph? What becomes of human feelings and instincts if they are crushed, every day, by the weight of dry official ‘facts’ and collective statistics? What happens to children’s imaginations in an education system in which wonder and fancy are completely denied? Why should anyone be denied pleasure when they live in times as hard as these?
Of strikes and fairy tales: Household Words and the genesis of Hard Times When he began to write Hard Times, Dickens had only just completed the last monthly part of his magnificent state-of-thenation novel Bleak House (March 1852 to September 1853). Now, barely four months later, he had to find the energy and new material to fill a weekly fiction serial to help boost flagging sales of his magazine Household Words.4 Dickens could, of course, mine the rich vein of his journalism for inspiration; his notes again reveal just how closely entwined this novel is with Household Words. It is often observed, for example, that an obvious inspiration for Hard Times was the ongoing workers’ strike that raged in the mill town of Preston in the north of England between the summer of 1853 and April 1854.5 Dickens had already commissioned and published one article on this bitter dispute in Household Words.6 After deciding on his novel’s title, he also determined that this northern industrial town might provide exactly the
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Introduction
right location for it. So, he visited Preston to see events for himself. The trip not only supplied Dickens with rich source material for his Household Words article ‘On Strike’ (1854), it also stimulated his vivid evocation of the fictional northern mill town ‘Coketown’. It did nothing, however, to alter his long-standing personal conviction that such bitter industrial action amounted to a collective folly. Seeing faults on both sides – employers and workers – Dickens instead appealed for calm: for ‘sense and moderation’ and greater ‘feeling’ and sympathy to enter into ‘the relations between employers and employed’.7 The town of Preston, then, may have supplied a fresh and highly topical backdrop for Hard Times, but it would not provide the plot: there would be no striking or strikers in his industrial novel.8 Indeed, it was an ideological battle, rather than an industrial dispute, that would come to define the novel Hard Times: the conflict between what Dickens called ‘Fact’ and ‘Fancy’. This conflict can be traced even further back among the pages of Household Words. In January 1853, Dickens published an article celebrating the imaginative ‘fancies’ of childhood, in which he insisted he would never grow out of his favourite childish pleasures – namely a delight in The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and Tales of the Arabian Nights.9 We should never, Dickens concluded, be ‘too rough with innocent fancies.’10 Later that same year he published an article attacking the re-writing of a collection of traditional fairy tales to give them a more instructive and moral edge. Fairies, goblins, witches and ogres were, he claimed, being horribly co-opted into Victorian campaigns supporting teetotalism, hard work and thrift. Dickens was appalled: ‘The world is too much with us, early and late. Leave this precious old escape from it alone.’11 And so the keynote of Hard Times began to sound: a rallying cry that in an age increasingly focused on the useful and the practical, there must still be
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some ‘escape’ from everyday struggles and strife – a time to sing, to dance, to relax, to be entertained, and – to quote the words of Hard Times’s own lisping circus philosopher Mr Sleary – to ‘be amuthed’ (p.47).
Concerns in context A ‘useful’ education
‘Fact, fact, fact!…You are to be in all things regulated and governed…by fact’ proclaims the government official visiting Coketown’s model school (p.8). His inspection, accompanied by the ‘eminently practical’ (p.21) local benefactor and factoryowner Mr Gradgrind, opens Hard Times. The schoolroom becomes the arena in which the novel’s battle of ideas begins. ‘You must discard the word Fancy altogether,’ he bellows at a terrified and cowering young pupil, who has not only dared to utter the forbidden word but has also just failed to correctly ‘define a horse’ (p.8, p.4). Adding insult to injury the pupil then interjects that she also sees nothing wrong with decoration that serves no purpose but pleasure; she would, for example, love to see a flowered carpet in her room. ‘You don’t,’ the inspector rails, ‘walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets’ (p.8). Dickens uses the absurdity of this exchange to highlight the increasingly repressive nature of Victorian ‘useful’ education with its mania for practicality which, he argued, was taking hold of the classroom.12 Dickens’s concerns are supported by the tone of the Preface to probably the most widely used school textbook of the day: A Series of Lessons by J.M. McCulloch, first published in 1831. It claimed to provide readings for children that would ‘store the mind with useful knowledge’ – topics in science taking the place of ‘sentimental poetry’, and ‘natural history’ replacing ‘preposterous and unsuitable exercises’ in ‘enacting dramatic scenes’.13 The limited education of working-class children, as Hard Times shows, appeared to be about shaping a new generation of more practical, more
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CHAPTER 1
The One Thing Needful ‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’ The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square
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HARD TIMES
coat, square legs, square shoulders, – nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was, – all helped the emphasis. ‘In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!’ The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.
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CHAPTER 2
Murdering the Innocents Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir – peremptorily Thomas – Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind – no, sir! In such terms Mr Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself, whether to his private circle of acquaintance, or to the public in general. In such terms, no doubt, substituting the words ‘boys and girls,’ for ‘sir,’ Thomas Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little pitchers before him, who were to be filled so full of facts. Indeed, as he eagerly sparkled at them from the cellarage before mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out
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of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away. ‘Girl number twenty,’ said Mr Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger, ‘I don’t know that girl. Who is that girl?’ ‘Sissy Jupe, sir,’ explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and curtseying. ‘Sissy is not a name,’ said Mr Gradgrind. ‘Don’t call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia.’ ‘It’s father as calls me Sissy, sir,’ returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and with another curtsey. ‘Then he has no business to do it,’ said Mr Gradgrind. ‘Tell him he mustn’t. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father?’ ‘He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please, sir.’ Mr Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling with his hand. ‘We don’t want to know anything about that, here. You mustn’t tell us about that, here. Your father breaks horses, don’t he?’ ‘If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses in the ring, sir.’ ‘You mustn’t tell us about the ring, here. Very well, then. Describe your father as a horsebreaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare say?’ ‘Oh yes, sir.’ ‘Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and horsebreaker. Give me your definition of a horse.’ (Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.) ‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’ said
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Glossary Book the First: Sowing xxxiii Sowing: Hard Times was published in weekly serial form between 1 April and 12 August 1854, and then in onevolume form in 1854 and divided into three ‘books’ entitled ‘Sowing’, ‘Reaping’ and ‘Garnering’ (see Introduction, p.xvi). These titles depict an agricultural cycle – in direct contrast to the industrial setting of the novel – and have Biblical connotations (‘Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap’, Galatians 6:7–9, King James Bible). Chapter 1 1
Needful: necessary; note also the Bible reference: ‘But one thing [i.e. the Kingdom of God] is needful’ (Luke 10:42, King James Bible)
1
commodius cellarage: extensive space (in a cellar)
2
neckcloth: folded piece of (usually white) cloth worn around the neck
2
imperial gallons: British unit of measurement for volume and capacity; 1 gallon is equivalent to 4.55 litres
Chapter 2 3
Murdering the Innocents: Bible reference to The Slaughter of the Innocents (Matthew 2:13–23) and Herod’s decree to have all boys under the age of two in Bethlehem killed
3
Gradgrind: Dickens’s choice of name for one of his main characters echoes the word ‘grindstone’ and the idiom ‘keeping one’s nose to the grindstone’, meaning to work hard and steadily.
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Glossary
3
multiplication table: one of a series of printed tables used as a quick reference to obtain the results of multiplying two numbers together. During the Victorian period, schoolchildren often had to memorise these tables and recite them in class.
3
pitchers: jugs
3
cannon loaded to the muzzle: large, wheeled gun, loaded right up to its barrel. In this extended metaphor, Gradgrind’s facts are like ammunition ready to blast the children out of their innocence – in a single shot (‘at one discharge’).
4
galvanizing apparatus: scientific equipment used to pass an electrical charge through matter. Dickens’s metaphor likens Gradgrind to an instrument that will inflict harm on the schoolchildren or ‘innocents’.
4
belongs to the horse-riding: is one of a team of horseriding performers (in Sleary’s circus)
4
objectionable calling: unsuitable profession. Gradgrind disapproves of Sissy’s father’s career, as his skill with horses is applied in the circus ring for a frivolous – rather than a practical or more commercially profitable – purpose.
4
breaks horses: tames wild horses so that they tolerate bridles, saddles and riders
4
farrier: someone who fits horseshoes onto horses
5
Quadruped: animal with four legs
5
Graminivorous: an animal that feeds on grass
6
pugilist: boxer (the ‘government officer’ is another menacing adult figure in the schoolroom ready to metaphorically beat the children into submission)
6
bolus: a large pill (being forced down the throat)
6
to fight all England: to fight according to the English boxing rules and regulations
6
fistic phraseology: boxing terms/language
6
to the ropes: fighting until an opponent is forced onto the ropes at the edge of the boxing ring (i.e. to the point of defeat)
6
Commissioners: officials representing Royal Commissions of Enquiry set up to investigate and report back to government on everything from health, education and legal
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